I'm dialing light up on my telescope

The Kickstarter for rose_lemberg's An Alphabet of Embers: An Anthology of Unclassifiables is now live.

With your help, I am looking to put together an anthology called An Alphabet of Embers. I want to make the kind of book you'd pick up when you're drowning for a gulp of beauty on a gray day. I will be looking for the short, the surreal, the weird. An Alphabet of Embers would live in that space between poetry and prose, between darkness and sound, between roads and breaths, its pages taut with starlight; between its covers, words would talk to each other, and have an occasional cup of tea.

Rewards range from free copies and cover art through mp3s of the theme song and other publications from Stone Bird Press* to Q&A's with sociolinguists and surprise vintage art. The one Æsir-blessed person who pledges $600 becomes the benefactor of a live performance of Atlakviða in grœnlenzku—The Greenlandic Lay of Atli, from the Poetic Edda—in the original Old Norse. OH MY GOD SOMEONE WITH $600 BID FOR THAT ALREADY I should like to hear that; it will be extremely cool. Also violent.

* I have work in both Here, We Cross (2012) and The Moment of Change (2012) and can vouch for the quality of the tables of contents. I am especially invested in Spelling the Hours, an anthology of poems on underrepresented figures in science and technology. The cover features a grumpy scientist holding crustaceans, all right? Don't let that languish in the limbo of unawarded rewards. $20 for the e-book, $45 for the print edition. GRUMPY CRUSTACEANS. And history.

So that started today. You've got a month to fund it. If it doesn't happen, where are you going to send that fabulous twilight thing between prose and poetry that has not yet found a home, though you know it deserves one? Here's the fire for it to warm its hands at. Give a feather to this flame.

And in the tray of colors, a whirlwind appeared

An assortment of fragments lying around my desktop. I imagine I intended most of them for roundup posts or further elaboration, but they got stranded. The longest one is from notes for a review of Byzantium (2012). I'm talking about Eddie Marsan in the first one:

I discovered him in 2008 when I watched an accidental double feature of Pierrepoint (2005) and Vera Drake (2004). Don't ever do this to yourself, by the way. I rented the one because it was the rare film starring Timothy Spall and the other because of Imelda Staunton and Mike Leigh. Then I was extremely depressed.

I scrolled too quickly down a page on Tumblr with a calendar of saints halfway through and read "Saint Deucalion." (Some saints hold wheels or scales, martyrs' palms, their own severed heads or breasts; he carries his mother's bones in his hands.)

I just received two pieces of spam from Hugo Jackarson and Alex Jackarson, respectively entitled "morning" and "staff." I'm just guessing at what they're the twin gods of, here.

The method of vampirism in this universe is single-source: an island somewhere off the Irish coast, a black rock spire cut by waterfalls and tides. Its slopes barely hold turf, only the endless cascading white water, but near its peak is the half-dome of a chamber cairn, built of the same black rock. Neolithic, not that the characters know by its shape. Birds spiral in and out of the entrance and the smoke-hole of the roof, like breathing. Inside is something referred to only as "the nameless saint." It manifests to each person as an apparition of themselves, which will answer truthfully any question they ask before it opens their throats with its pointed nail. To some it is violent, to others matter-of-fact, to yet others we do not see how it behaves. At the moment of transformation, birds explode in a cawing cloud, carrion-black, the white water over the black rocks thunders blood-red. The person who emerges from the dolmen hut is a vampire in most particulars of the legend: immortal so long as they sustain themselves by the blood of others and avoid critical trauma like decapitation, dismemberment, or destruction by fire; not unable to bear sunlight, but not especially fond of it, either; stronger than mortal humans, swifter, capable of perceiving more in the world; and possibly soulless, although we hear this only from one source, who may or may not have it right. It has never been relevant to one of our protagonists and the other ceased to care long before she was technically dead. It is unclear whether terminal illness is a prerequisite of the change. It plays a part in all four cases we witness (there is an aborted fifth), but it may just be the case that people are desperate enough to make the decision only in those straits. There are no fangs, pallor, other traditional tells beyond unchanging age. Under the right circumstances, the impetus of hunger or defense, the nearness of spilled blood or suitable prey, the thumbnail of each finger lengthens—like a cat's protractile claw—into a hard white razor point, ideal for puncturing a jugular or a vein in the wrist. After that, they drink as neatly or as messily as any human from a spurting liquid source.

While deleting a quantity of e-mail from my inbox, I finally remembered what Elizabeth Hand's "Near Zennor" reminded me of: William Sleator's Into the Dream (1979).

I need to remember that kippers are a delicious and inexpensive source of fish. I used to eat them more frequently as a child; they were one of my grandmother's standard breakfast foods.

Mary Gentle's First History does not count—her Carthaginians are Visigothic colonizers. (She really liked the Visigoths.) I love Ash: A Secret History (2000), but I am coming to realize more and more that her alternate histories entail some really weird forms of erasure.

Dancers.

Poetry is the wrong question.